Friday, August 04, 2006

In Congress, two of the Pentagon's most senior generals - Gen. John Abizaid, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, and Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff - testified yesterday that the surge in sectarian violence in recent weeks raises the civil-war possibility. In London, Britain's outgoing ambassador to Iraq, William Patey, advised his government that Iraq is more likely headed toward "low-intensity civil war" and sectarian partition than toward a stable democracy.

Where the hell these guys been for the past two years? This civil war has been brewing ever since we set foot on Iraqi soil!

Colonel Hammes mentions that the in Iraq situation mirrors closely what happened in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation: freedom fighters forced the USSR out, and all hell broke loose, but that hell started cracking open amongst the various factions even before the Soviets began pulling out, as rival groups, smelling Soviet retreat, began jockeying for the low-hanging fruit in an effort to be in place when the tree fell down.

And we all know what grew out of that: the Taliban, Osama bin Laden's haven and 9/11. And this is before taking into account the failure of Israel to neutralize the threat of Hamas and Hizbollah with mighty blunder of invading Lebanon. Global jihad might be the least of our worries. Iraq is an oil-rich nation. Iran would love to get its mitts on Iraq. So would a lot of countries that we compete with, like China and Russia. How long a stretch is it to imagine a global war the likes of which we've never seen involving nations and powers that have no regard for the "rules of war"?

The difficulty is, there is no other course of action for America but to pull our troops out. To stay would mean risking an occupation, the length of which would rival Roman forces in Gaul.

What we need to do in this military contraction is take a good long hard look at how we're going to fight was some have described as 4GW, a war where your enemy is going to hide behind rocks and trees and fire at will, like the American Revolution, only without the niceties of the Geneva Convention or military etiquette.

We can't do it with a blanket armed force. We'd better come up with a better way.

"Liberals got women the right to vote. Liberals got African-Americans the right to vote. Liberals created Social Security and lifted millions of elderly people out of poverty. Liberals ended segregation. Liberals passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. Liberals created Medicare. Liberals passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act. What did Conservatives do? They opposed them on every one of those things...every one! So when you try to hurl that label at my feet, 'Liberal,' as if it were something to be ashamed of, something dirty, something to run away from, it won't work, Senator, because I will pick up that label and I will wear it as a badge of honor." -- Matt Santos, The West Wing